Brendan Ward’s book ‘The Beethoven Obsession’ also launched in 2013, is a narrative that dramatically depicts the enterprising undertakings and achievements of Willems, Ward and Wayne Stuart, in producing this exhaustive body of recorded work. Interestingly, Ward clearly documents Wayne Stuart’s dual episodic engagements with both the commercial world of the necessary financial support, and the artistic piano design world, describing the reality and tensions of making decisions that have influenced the evolution of Stuart & Sons piano from the 1990s in Melbourne, through to 2012 in Newcastle.

Ward’s narrative positions Beethoven’s music as the central object, and Willems and the Stuart & Sons piano as the actors, interacting and producing an outcome of new perspectives on Beethoven’s monumental music, challenging established views on one of the corner stones of classical music repertoire for the past 200 years.Ward’s prose attaches plenty of colloquial ‘under dog’ national cultural characteristics of an Australian made contemporary instrument ‘taking on’ the traditional European-American clandestine Steinway concert piano traditions, at the Sydney Opera House, at the time when Sydney was host of the Olympic Games.It is the interactions of a nationally unrecognised musical identity of low socio-economic European refugee background, with an unknown Australian piano claiming to be the contemporary alternative to the 120 year convention of European and American modern piano design, manifesting a new interpretation of the musical language of Beethoven that creates the story. At the outset, these disparate ‘actors’ seemed unlikely characters to achieve a successful new interpretation, yet their unison and separate interactions with the music culminate in unique, award winning recordings that enhanced the pianist’s career and initiated a positive public perception of Australia’s new piano. Ward’s literal ‘snapshot’ reveals the interactive collective energies that generated a positive community awareness of the new piano, and with it a unique perspective and sound of Beethoven’s music.

This multi-layered model of activity relates closely to the structure of this research program, which examines the interaction of the Stuart & Sons piano with the ‘actors’ of my piano music style, the re-composition of historic Aboriginal music and the traditional modern piano.